Securing Urban Heritage by Heike Oevermann Eszter Gantner

Author:Heike Oevermann, Eszter Gantner [Heike Oevermann, Eszter Gantner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367148430
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusions and outlook

In recent years, state-run institutions for heritage preservation have begun to make their documentation partially available to the interested public. At the same time, highly diverse groups of actors interested primarily in the built heritage of later modernity have placed informal collections of information online, which they use as a matter of course. The quality of collaboration between heritage preservation institutions and these citizen groups is variable; the two complement and profit from each other. The visibility of documentation on the Internet in itself makes clear that heritage preservation is neither a form of nostalgia dictated from on high nor merely an additional bureaucratic hurdle in the construction process, but rather, to refer to Laurajane Smith quoted in the introduction to this book, a cultural process with various actors. This process includes the users of databases that are affiliated with neither state offices nor activist groups. Google and Facebook doubtless know a great deal about these users, while the scientific community still knows very little, since few user studies have yet been undertaken on behalf of archives or museums. These reveal how the structure of user groups and their behaviour are changing (cf. Huvila, 2008). The institutions will also change, however, as is currently under discussion in contributions to archival science within the Digital Humanities, where the step from a digital archive to a participative archive has been attempted (ibid.). The documentation of modernism can form a first step in this direction within the field of heritage preservation. The (well-documented) destruction of key buildings from this period fuelled public interest, producing an overall positive influence on the listing process. Linked to the importance of documentation are the surrounding actors whose documentation work often forms a basis for the inventories of national or local heritage institutions and illustrates the significance of informal provisional listings as a protection instrument. Releasing specific information via publicly accessible documentation and databases raises questions concerning what kinds of documentation or inventory information can and should be published, or whether this represents a contradiction: documentation versus security design? On the one hand, such knowledge should be shared with the public to enable appropriation of such heritage; on the other hand, the publication of sensitive information may represent an additional hazard in terms of security risks. Documenting modernity is a complex cultural process between new stakeholders and traditional institutions, new methods of placement, and public access that is in development and requires further discussion.

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